Dez Bryant isn’t elite anymore but could help the right team

Three-time Pro Bowl receiver Dez Bryant is a free agent after being cut by the Dallas Cowboys on Friday afternoon. He leaves as the franchise’s all-time touchdown leader (73) and has many wondering whether he can contribute to a team in need of pass catchers. Except for Bryant, who still feels he has a lot to contribute to a franchise willing to take the chance Dallas made a big mistake. If Bryant does find a willing partner who gives him a chance to show the Cowboys they were wrong — chances are you want to keep expectations low.

Last season Bryant was targeted by Dak Prescott 27 percent of the time, the ninth-most among wideouts. Perhaps Bryant can find a team that’s willing to feature him as prominently in their offense, but it is much more likely he is a No. 2 option, giving him fewer opportunities. The highest target share by a team’s second option in 2017 was found on the New York Jets, where Jermaine Kearse garnered 21 percent of the targets but the average is closer to a 14 percent share.

This is where we can do some back-of-the-envelope math to figure out how good Bryant can be in 2018. The average quarterback made 462 passing attempts in 2017, giving Bryant somewhere in the range of 65 to 97 possible targets next season. If we use only the ratios from his three Pro Bowl seasons (2013, 2014 and 2016), an unlikely occurrence but one that gives us the best-possible scenario, we can expect Bryant’s production to range from 557 and 831 yards in addition to six to nine touchdowns.

But again — that assumes he will be playing at a Pro Bowl level when there is evidence he is on the decline.

Bryant hasn’t been playing at an elite level the past few seasons. His 2015 campaign can be excused — he suited up for just nine games due to a broken foot — but his past two years have been sub-par as well, even though he was named to the Pro Bowl in 2016. That season Bryant caught 50 of 96 passes for 796 yards and eight touchdowns. However, according to the game charters at Pro Football Focus, his average yards per route run (1.9) in 2016 barely made him a top 25 receiver. In 2017 he was even worse, averaging just 1.6 yards per route run, 41st out of 93 qualified receivers.

Bryant’s air yards per target, a leading indicator of how good a receiver is, also fell to 4.3 in 2017, just a few ticks shy of his career low set during the injury-plagued 2015 campaign. Dips in his air yards per target have oscillated throughout his career, so that alone isn’t a red flag, but there is also information signaling Bryant’s speed and quickness might be on the downturn. Per Matt Harmon’s Reception Perception, which tracks how often receivers get open while running various routes, Bryant scored “below the 10th percentile against man and press coverage in 2017.” His average yards of separation in 2016 (1.8) and 2017 (2.4) also ranked him as the second-worst and sixth-worst in this regard, over those two seasons, respectively, per the NFL’s NextGen stats.

If Bryant indeed can’t get separation from his defenders he will need a passer who is comfortable throwing the ball into tight windows, one that is at least as aggressive as Prescott was in 2017 (19.6 percent of throws), and there aren’t many of them expected to be starters in 2018. In fact, just one, Carson Wentz of the Philadelphia Eagles, had a substantially higher rate of pass attempts than Prescott in 2017 where there was a defender within one yard or less of the receiver at the time of completion or incompletion.

It would also be difficult for a team to primarily use Bryant as a red-zone target at this stage of his career. He was involved in a league-leading 36 percent of his team’s red-zone targets in 2017, which accounted for five of his six touchdowns. However, that isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success. Bryant converted 4.5 percent of his red-zone targets into touchdowns, just a tick higher than the league average (4.4 percent) and lower than his peer group of wideouts with at least 100 red-zone targets last year (5.1 percent). In fact, just two of those five touchdowns were jump balls in the end zone; one was a wide-open catch that Bryant muscled into the end zone with two others good throws by Prescott.

Taking into account his diminished ability and less of a target share overall, including a decline in red-zone opportunities, expect Bryant to finish 2018 with between 500 and 700 receiving yards and three to four touchdowns, roughly the production we saw from Martavius Bryant, Sammy Watkins and Marqise Lee last season.

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